Medusa's Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age
Powers' latest (and, to my mind, best) novel is Medusa's Web, a meticulously researched novel about an extended, dysfunctional family whose secret history is bound up with "spiders" -- eight-legged drawings that allow you to travel out of your body and into other places and times, when other spiders were taken.
The spiders have been with us for centuries; Medusa's eight-snaked head was a spider, and the reality is that looking into her eyes didn't turn men to stone, it merely transfixed them as they imbibed the experiences of thousands of other people, including, possibly, people from other planes of experience. The spiders are alive, two-dimensional beings for whom all times are the same time, and when you notice them, they notice you and take you into their world, where all objects appear infinitely tall, where depth vanishes. Taking spiders means letting strangers through all history enter your body, or sometimes, future versions of yourself, and their use of your limbs and mouth can leave you injured, or even dead.
But the spider-users crave them, because there's that moment, that moment of dislocation when you're in no body and every body, when your self is blissfully obliterated. This is a story about drugs and addiction, in the phildickian style, but Powers far surpasses Dick.
Powers's story is set in Los Angeles, in the huge, decrepit mansion of the old lady who served as matriarch to the family -- a house that recalls the House of Usher in more ways than one -- a mansion that has played a key role in the history of spiders and Hollywood, involving a cast of characters that includes Rudy Valentino and many of silent film's most debauched leading lights. The Powers method for constructing secret histories is to line up seemingly unrelated historical events that share a place or time and then invent a connection to explain the coincidence, and it works brilliantly here, as the very geography of LA and the history of film are recruited to give a plausible footing to the story Powers tells. (more")